Monday, May 11, 2015

Poetic, Not Scientific License

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There's a commercial now playing, depicting the historic first step of an astronaut on Mars. "Where will you be when it happens, and will you have the means to view it, no matter where you are?"

The breathless narrator speaks of the 'naut, poised outside the lander waiting to make that first historic step...but unless he waits there anywhere from four to twenty minutes, the time it takes for an electromagnetic wave to reach the Earth from Mars, that moment will not be in "real time".

Why do I suspect that to most of the folk who watch that ad, educated in government schools, it will not occur to them?

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